Let's talk about Brand

Brand has become one of the strongest champs in several positions but I think there are some issues with how he's strong.

He got a lot of buffs relatively recently because he was weak before. His buffs were mostly to his %hp damage both directly to his passive and indirectly with the changes to Liandry's which are uniquely perfect for Brand.

I think it's fine for Brand to be strong and deal a lot of damage but the problem is he will still deal a lot of damage when he's behind because so much of it is just %hp damage.

It's almost not worth it to build huge amounts of AP on him. There are certain items that are good and then otherwise you could just build tank on top of those items, because AP itself doesn't do all that much for him.

Why is he like this honestly? Nobody likes it when a champ just can't be shut down in any way. No matter how behind he is, he's always going to hit hard.

Would it make him unviable if he depended more on AP scaling?

It could be accomplished by shifting some of his passive to flat damage like this:

Passive DoT: 2% HP damage per stack -> 1% HP damage per stack + 0.8 damage per Brand's champion level + 8.5% of Brand's AP Passive 3 stack Explosion: 12% - 16% (based on level) (+ 1.5% per 100 AP) -> ( 6% - 8% (based on level) (+0.75% per 100 AP) ) Enemy Max HP + 10 damage per Brand's champion level + 70% of Brand's AP

That looks complicated but in game the tooltip would show the numbers color coded and also show you the total so it would be readable. And the TLDR of that is: Take half of the % damage off and replace it with roughly similar scaling of champion level + AP in flat damage so that Brand would need to care about being behind/ahead more than he currently does.